Eclipse 2017

We watched the eclipse from Fort Neigle, a Civil War hill-fort in Nashville Tennessee. It was not only a rare and notable astronomical event, it was a public happening as well.

The numbers of people who converged on that city and our hill-fort for the eclipse was impressive and the traffic back to Birmingham was murder; I gave up on the freeway at Decatur and went cross-country on blue highways.

It was by far the longest trip back from Nashville that I have ever taken, but it was worth it. There is just something about climbing the road from the valleys on the west side of Brindlee Mountain in full summer at twilight.

That particular locality has been occasionally on my mind since a few excursions from my days as a caver when we explored some tremendous bore-hole caverns under the mountain. There are wonders there, hidden from the rest of us that only the locals know about and I think and that someday I'll get back there and explore again, steal the locals secrets!

But the truth is that life goes by fast and projects and expeditions fall by the wayside; you have to pace yourself and set priorities.

And to me, to be on a hill-top in a historic city and watch a total eclipse of the sun with the people I love is near the top of my list. It is a not too subtle reminder that the Earth goes around the Sun and the Moon around the Earth and in cycles that are predictable and discernible to the learned and that in itself is not a little thing to rational people living in a world where a large portion of our brethren go to great lengths, making a cult of meanness and denial of indisputable facts.

In November 1864 a Union Army garrison waited anxiously on our hill-fort and listened to the cannons and saw the flash of exploding ordinance from a night battle in nearby Franklin; my great-grandfather was there in another army, the Confederate Army of Tennessee-- --

Classic misdirection, an unfortunate situation that destroyed 700,000 lives because of self-serving logic that inflicted unnecessary suffering on people of color and not-indirectly a lack of opportunity and world-weariness on his own descendants.

It's history, natural and human which are really the same thing exactly; we are all bound up in a chaotic universe with discernible patterns that are useful as well as inspiring!